MPC control of water level in a navigation canal - The Cuinchy-Fontinettes case study

The paper describes an application of MPC to maintaining the water level of navigation canals. The task is to ensure that the water level is within a certain range to enable navigation. The proposed method is tested on the case of Cuincy-Fontinettes reach, which is a navigation canal in North France. The water level is disturbed by known and unknown inputs to the canal. These inputs are the lock movements. While now only local control exists, in this work we propose a distant downstream MPC controller to control the water level in the canal reach. The controller is implemented and tested by numerical simulation using the numerical solution of the Saint-Venant (SV) equations. The controller is able to reduce the water level deviations caused by the lock operation.